


The Game of the Goose

by Vehemently



Category: Bourne (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-25
Updated: 2008-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That alarm-bell sound, as the railing rang from the impact, remains with him still, a constant warning in the back of his mind like the oncoming aura of migraine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Game of the Goose

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Maat

Senderines is a sensible fellow. He carries only one identification card on his person at any given time, usually the same one these three months since he has been inactive. Senderines has been Carl Katzenbach for nearly two years, and all his neighbors know him by that name, and greet him warmly. No point confusing them because of the change.

Nobody knows him as Senderines except himself.

It's a fine day in Buenos Aires, autumn turning cool into winter as March becomes April, and the little boys who live on the ground floor have almost finished drawing the spiral board for the Game of the Goose on the cobblestones in chalk. Senderines supplies them the chalk, and the dice, which they throw on the tray that he carries down with his afternoon coffee. You can't throw dice on cobblestone, after all, and Senderines suspects he grew up with chalk on a different, smoother surface. The little boys call him Don Carlo, robust and with their chests thrown out, as if they were proud vassals in some feudal country. Then they assemble on dirtied knees and throw the dice for the game. Their mother is just grateful they're not roaming the city, learning to be thieves.

He has been inactive for too long, since he botched that last shooting. He still sees it in his head, as easily as imagining his own face in the mirror: his target massively magnified, down to the bad job he'd done shaving his face. The blush that came up those cheeks as he spoke to a woman: his assistant, his much-younger mistress, a daughter who made him uneasy, Senderines didn't know. The man had been in shirtsleeves, smoking out on a tiny balcony and contemplating the night, with no idea of his vulnerability. Senderines had looked down the scope of his rifle and fired at the iron railing instead.

He still doesn't know why he did that. His handler swore at him, the next day; but no call to report to Brasilia for reassignment. No colleague arriving in the night to slit his throat. Senderines does not understand. It has never been his job to understand, but he works at it anyway. That alarm-bell sound, as the railing rang from the impact, remains with him still, a constant warning in the back of his mind, like the oncoming aura of migraine.

Dice on the coffee tray always bring him out of that. Senderines cannot say his gratitude to the two little boys on the ground floor; they wouldn't understand it. He just makes sure they've got enough chalk to keep playing.

***

"Oh come on, Tom. You can't." Pamela Landy stood her ground, hand like a stop sign. His necktie was loose, slumping like his trench coat and the mashed shape of his suitcoat beneath. Pam had slept in the office more than once, but she usually didn't wake up with the lines of her desk blotter on her cheek.

Tom said, "But you'll need --"

"I'll take care of it," she said over his protest. "This is for your own career." She flicked her hair off her shoulders and hitched up the briefcase strap. She was fair; she took with her nothing classified, only personal materials she would be sorry to see destroyed. Kramer hadn't been Director long enough for her to guess whether he became spiteful under pressure; she guessed he probably did, considering.

"At least let me drive you to the train station," Tom said, low. He glanced around the lobby, but there was no need. If they were being watched -- and they probably were -- it was by camera. He had to know that too; but maybe that glimmer of caution was a sign he wasn't going to be totally helpless without her.

"No." She took a step back, so that they would have to speak at normal volume. "I'm taking the shuttle, anyway. The Senate has me for two days, and then I'm going to take a vacation." She would come back to an invitation to resign, of course, but no need for unconditional surrender. Pam was plotting it in her head already: feint and counter-feint, the favors and debts of the Senate Committee. She wasn't worried about her own career.

Tom's face was pinched, flushed down near his throat with anger or helplessness. He was such a square man: probably he'd played football in college, defensive line. Pam didn't know details like that about her subordinates; there was too much else to know.

"I need a vacation, Tom. Even he thought so; he told me I looked tired." She crinkled up her eyes for a laugh, but Tom wouldn't laugh with her. She checked her watch, to signal she was leaving, and watched him bring his shoulders up in a big, theatrical breath -- and then let go.

"Okay, Pam. Just -- be careful."

She smiled away the bitterness. "Always. And hey, if they offer you my job, take it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and turned his head away. They had nothing in common except their work, or anyway nothing in common that Pam knew about. Maybe in a year, if she landed at some kind of think tank, she would be able to recruit him and work with him again. But think tanks don't go into the field; they do nothing but analyze and advise. It was strange, to see so many things at an end.

They shook hands, his two giant mitts enveloping her fingers. Some great meaningfulness beamed out from his eyes like a signal flare, but Pam couldn't read his content, only the emotion behind it. Finally he let go and Pam turned away toward the doors.

"Knock 'em dead," he said to her retreating back. Pam winced to herself. If he was going to survive, Tom was going to have to learn to talk like a politician. Pam pushed her way through the revolving doors of the Agency office, and stood on the Manhattan street with one hand high, waiting for a taxi. As a yellow sedan bellied up to the curb, she mightily ignored the loitering men, coiled wires attached to their ears, who watched her from the opposite street corner.

***

He stands on the faded chalk drawing in front of his building. It's a narrow enough street, in an old enough part of the city, that cars don't come through. Even deliveries have to be done with those odd three-wheeled trucks, like giant tricycles, that can corner more neatly than a Fiat and fit into the tiniest spaces. He asked once, and the widow upstairs told him that those trucks had been around for years and years. Senderines holds onto that surprise as a clue, and puzzles onward through the thicket.

It hasn't rained, and the late sky is that sumptuous copper of the city -- Old World, he might have said, and that's another clue -- and the sounds of throngs coming home from afternoon work is all about him. Far off, the shrieks of children, maybe the little boys from the ground floor. Senderines kicks at the chalk-lines from their game.

The game is a spiral of sixty-three numbered squares, cascading inward. Senderines stares at it often, in the night when he can't sleep and the block is just him and the rain and the night-birds. The little boys draw their squares anew every time they're wiped out, careful crosses through the sevens and tails on the ones. They fill in the special squares with the proper pictures: the geese scattered around the game -- you're lucky, roll again -- look like chickens, or haystacks with feet. The skull, at 58, is the mere hint of eye-sockets and grinning teeth. The maze, the inn, the well, the town square: symbols all. Arch, or roof, or arch _and_ roof. The little boys never mix up one with the other. The bridge just _belongs_ at 6, and the boys laughed at Senderines the first time he asked why it is not somewhere else in the spiral.

Senderines has no missions, no sudden trips to take; so the cover routines he has worked out are all the meaningfulness in his daily life. Today he walks out of his little square and catches the Colectivo bus to the Biblioteca Nacional. He has plenty of hours to spend until the little boys from the ground floor are done with school, and can come home to play.

There are so many books he has never read, so many authors he's never heard of. He has to ask the librarians for advice on what to try. The first time, it was terrible, embarrassing: Do you like mysteries? Adventures, romances, science fiction, spy thrillers? Not those, he laughed, and of course he could not explain his laughter. He ended up with a Delibes novel, _El Cid_ , and a slim volume of Cortázar's short stories.

It has taken him months to crawl through the Cortázar, two or three pages every time he is in the library. Nobody else seems to ask for that book, so it is always available. The imagery and attitudes are foreign, almost frightening, the writer's bizarre anti-realism thumping and mashing at the senses till they are reshaped into something new. An anxious woman in Paris who vomits kittens; a man in an aquarium in Mexico who finds himself swapping places with a fish. Disappearing islands, highways that go nowhere, narrators who annihilate themselves in ecstatic simplicity. Senderines has to close the book, sometimes, and go to lie down; the headaches disallow him from reading on those days.

The books he takes home with him are stylish detective fiction, cynical and atmospheric, most of them from Spain. They are entertaining without starting up the heavy, iron reverberations inside his skull.

***

Being the director of a security analysis institute involved a lot of mail: unctuous invitations and impassioned screeds and hate-letters that came in envelopes lined with tinfoil. Pam didn't read much of it herself, or else she would get nothing done. Her second assistant, Jimmy, made it a habit to punctuate their coffee break with the letters deemed important enough for Pam to see them in person. He was a bright young thing, freshly-minted poli-sci degree and his suits so new they still smelled like department store. He nudged open her office door with a coffee tray balanced on one arm, glancing at the clock.

Pam cleared space for him on the table, dropping the stack of file folders on an extra chair. He always seemed surprised at courtesies like that; she didn't know whether that made him young or her old. He poured off two cups -- it was nice china, one of the few indulgences Pam allowed herself in the office -- and knew just how much cream she liked. He dropped into the chair opposite her, flexible and relaxed: he didn't wear a suit like a strait-jacket, the way most young people did. Pam wondered idly whether he'd gone to Catholic school, and then settled in to read her mail in silence.

Today's batch was manageable; Jimmy was a strikingly good guesser at the underlying motives of polite wording. Pam scanned through a thank-you note from an ambassador, an invitation to a symposium down in Washington, and a barely-veiled threat from a flunky in the NSA structure.

She set that aside to think over when and whether to show it to the police, and turned to the last item in the pile: a card from Tom Cronin. It was mailed from a home address, out in Queens, rather than from his Manhattan office. He'd taken over most of the functions of her job, Pam knew; and as far as she could tell he'd been doing it well. With most of the conspirators under arrest (headed to minimum-security federal, if anything; they probably played golf every day) and the captured asset from 71st Street catatonic in an asylum (no golf for him), Tom had a reasonable chance of serving out his pension from a position of honor.

She didn't know what Tom had decided to do, about all the other leftover assets from Blackbriar. Probably he hadn't been allowed to make that decision himself, and everything was waiting in suspended animation until a new Director cleared Senate confirmation.

The card from Tom was a summer watercolor, something more subtle than Pam would have expected out of him. She stirred her coffee and ignored Jimmy's habit of shuffling the pages of his to-do notebook while she studied the tones of blue and violet in the little landscape. Must have been something the wife had picked out. She opened up the card.

Indeed, the inside had handwriting she did not recognize, inviting her to a Memorial Day cookout, some place on Long Island she'd never heard of. It was signed Heather, and then with Tom's name in his own handwriting. Pam hadn't known the wife's name, although she'd heard Tom arguing on the phone, now and then. She'd heard him sigh and apologize, again and again, but he'd never asked for time off and she'd never offered it. It wasn't that kind of job.

Pam set the card down gently on her desk. A cookout. A back yard, a grill, men she'd only ever seen in suits wearing shorts and rough-housing with children. Wives, whom Pam had never met nor wanted to meet. Potato salad with mayonnaise, in big plastic bowls.

"Okay, Jimmy, what's up for today?" she asked, and Jimmy sat up straight to read off his list.

That afternoon, she detoured through an arty bookstore for the right kind of stationery on which to write her regrets. It was a simple card, a stylish black-and-white photograph on the front. A moody cityscape, Mitteleuropa in gray dawn: the television tower peering down over Berlin. 

She sat at her desk at home and composed the right phrase to counteroffer lunch in Midtown, some time soon when things calmed down and she could get away. Her fountain pen glided over the paper, silent. She was not used to writing to Tom, not when she could usually just shout across a room, or at worst drop him a curt email. She signed her name and read the thing over: the inference that she was headhunting for her institute was easy to make for any eyes that might read it. She signed her first name, three block letters rather than the scrawl that went on the bottom of paperwork, and slid the card into its envelope.

After a long moment of consideration, she included her business card before sealing up the envelope. Really, if you're going to do the cloak-and-dagger routine, you might as well trade cell phone numbers.

***

Until they send for him or send someone for him, Senderines takes his leisure. His evenings are mostly spent at La Pasionaria, the cafe down the street, that keeps pastries under glass in the mornings and serves indifferent local wines at night. There are three or four people who recognize him, regulars, who will swagger over to where he stands, elbow on the heavy tin bar, and fall right back into the conversation they'd been having the evening before.

Senderines is a good listener. Bad joints, bad paychecks, glorious fortunes lost when the peso went to shit: he takes in everything and gives back the appropriate expression of grief. If nobody else is there, he sympathizes with the owner at the unfortunate necessity of watering the wines. The earnest spiralling blaze of complaints feel like life; he is greedy for that warmth. He doesn't know what he would complain about, if asked, but then, nobody asks. La Pasionaria is a place where people hold forth, and that's terrible unless there's an audience. Senderines likes to be useful.

He is thirty, he thinks. The widow upstairs has begun to look at him with a careful eye, as if she has a daughter or niece in mind, someone to settle him. A man of thirty ought to be thinking about marriage, and Senderines is certain he has never been married. Inward, inward: another clue.

Women seem to like Senderines at first, enough to follow him home; but few come back for a second bout. Each of them walks through his flat with a strange air of diffidence or confusion, a tension in their bodies he cannot explain. One woman, a nice girl from Montevideo, asked him, "Is this where you live all the time?"

Senderines looked around the austere walls and tidy, narrow bookcases and improvised, "No, I only come here one week a month." He doesn't know why he told her that lie, but it relaxed her, so now he tells it to every woman he brings home. They don't seem so disturbed if they think there is a reason why he owns only one plate and cup, if they see his paltry wardrobe in his closet, laid out in immaculate exactitude, and assume the rest of him is somewhere else.

And after all, that might be true. It would explain several things.

If she stays the whole night through, if he startles awake to another body in his bed and then finds it warm and moving beside him, Senderines takes the woman to breakfast on those glassed-in pastries at La Pasionaria. He loves to walk the morning streets, to wade through the seas of children streaming into their schools with shrieks and shoves, and settle at an outdoor table with a newspaper under his arm. Women catch him smiling, then, and remark on how it changes his face.

If he really likes the woman, if he thinks he wouldn't mind seeing her a second time, he brings up a topic of conversation over breakfast: "Have you read much Cortázar?"

Sometimes women have suggestions: Manuel Puig, Elena Quiroga, Alejandra Pizarnik. He writes the names down on receipts fished from his pockets, and carries the slips of paper with him to the library. He puzzles his way through the tall library shelves, like a goose wandering in a thicket.

***

Pamela Landy did not make friends with the people who worked for her. It got tricky, especially if you'd been in as long as Pam had been, especially if you were the woman and you were the boss. Tom Cronin had danced all the way out to the line for her, maybe put his toes over it, and still they weren't friends. Pam picked an outdoor trendy place on the East Side, full of tourist chatter and pedestrians wandering past, and watched as Tom picked at his salad Niçoise, fussily removing the anchovies and the olives to the rim of his plate.

They'd run out of pleasantries a long while ago, and Pam found herself enjoying their mutual silence. The breeze touched their hair and they watched a dogwalker wrangle ten or twelve little yappy creatures on criss-crossing leashes. "Kind of reminds me of my job," said Tom, and it startled Pam into laughter.

"Maybe if they were pit bulls," she replied. 

He glanced at her to assess the irony of that. "I meant the rooms of screaming overcafffeinated analysts." And that squint settled into him, that questing curiosity. "Funny you should bring them up, though."

Pam smiled, bland. "Seven angry Senators never grilled me about the Agency prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome," she said, and Tom dropped his gaze.

"Oh. Right." He paused and toyed with his salad. She hadn't thought of him as a salad person, really; in Germany, he'd settled into a routine that involved an awful lot of the local sausages. Suddenly she wondered whether Tom had high blood pressure. A man in his forties, even a reasonably fit man: he had to look out for that kind of thing. Especially in such a high-stress job as he had.

"Okay, Tom," she said at last. "Out with it." Pam tucked into her lunch, knife and fork crossed carefully. She cut herself small bites while she waited for Tom to speak.

Tom was sunburned at his hairline, on his ears and nose. It was half freckle and half red scales, as if he'd fallen asleep, beer in hand, in his Long Island back yard. Sometimes he looked ridiculous in a suit, like a highschool coach from the suburbs. He put his hand over his mouth as if he had no idea that Niçoise comes with capers. From beneath his fat fingers he mumbled:

"It's pretty bad, Pam."

"Is this something I'm allowed to know?" she asked, cool. It was too fine a day, sunny and warm, to be suborning a felony.

He snorted. "Some of it I got off Google. You know he was a Captain? Second-generation Army."

"I read his jacket," she reminded Tom. "And I got a couple of calls from a General who'd mentored him, back in the middle-90s. I don't know if you care, but that's probably where the press leaks came from."

Tom's eyes tracked from side to side, as if he were reading a document perfectly captured in his mind. Over his shoulder, Pam scanned the pedestrians, their gaits, whether they lingered. It was too useful a habit to give up. Slowly he said, "I guess I wondered why he volunteered. What kind of family he left behind. What happened, that he'd --" a hand-wave, the silvery tines of his fork a-glint, "-- give up everything."

It was strange, to have the leisure for philosophy. They'd both looked at the interim reports from 1999; they both knew he'd agreed to everything, and then when it came down to it, resisted his training regimen with the bullish stamina they would later come to know as his trademark. The program had learned years' worth of conditioning techniques, just from a week with him. They'd called him _dirty little secret_ , and Pam realized suddenly that the name came not from his failure, or even from the way his handlers had used him for private gain, but from how tenuous a grip the agency had always had on him. And with that realization, Pam knew at once what Tom was getting at. "I don't know if I can help you," she said, chin high.

Her icy dignity act worked every time. Tom ducked his head and moved lettuce around on his plate. A green bean skittered away from him, rolling free. "I'm not asking for," he said, and bit his chapped lip. "I have to find him. Please."

Pam considered the fact that _Tom_ was asking _her_ about the matter, rather than the other way around. "I have no reason to believe he's anything but dead in the East River. That's what they've officially concluded, haven't they?"

"Yes, they have," he said automatically: not _we have_ , but _they have_. She scrutinized him openly. He'd always been a terrible actor; he got a sweaty upper lip when he was nervous. "But, well, if he's dead, I guess it doesn't matter. But if he's not --"

Pam smiled at him to hide the wince. "Oh, Tom. What did you find."

He smiled back, shy, afraid. "Please just -- just will you try? Anything. I have to give due diligence on this one." His eyebrows collapsed into something like sorrow. This was more than just intra-agency guilt. "Just say my name in a television interview, or something."

Of all the blunt communication tools -- Pam was smarter than that. Feint, and counter-feint. She asked, "You think it's something he could fix for you?"

"I think it's something he deserves to know is broken," he said, with naked bitterness.

"That bad?"

Slowly Tom got a grip on himself, regained his composure. He returned to his salad and stabbed at the food on his plate, blind. "He'll... I think so. I have discretionary funds. I can hire him as a freelancer, or something."

"Don't be ridiculous," Pam told him, and closed her mouth in a thin line. Tom watched her face, eyes wide. She couldn't stand his earnest scrutiny. "I don't know if I can help you," she said again.

***

Senderines stares in his mirror. It's getting on in the afternoon, late enough that the little boys on the ground floor will be ready to play their game, soon, and will need his tray to throw their dice.

It rained, the other day. They will have to chalk the game-board all over again on the cobblestones. No matter how often it rains, they always draw the spiral again, as if it lived there in front of the building and they were merely discovering it every time. He doesn't know why they don't draw it on a board, at a size they can manage between them: but they don't. He can almost draw it himself from memory, now: square after square, turning inward counterclockwise, like hopscotch gone awry. ( _Rayuela, rayuela_. The Argentine tongue would take unkindly to such a cumbersome word as "hopscotch.") Spirals within spirals, and the lucky goose in the special squares.

There are enough old-style markets in the city that he has seen real geese: they are like crude caricatures of swans, loud and violent and thick in all the places they should be elegantly slim. Senderines much prefers goose on a plate, or in paté, to the live animal. He has no idea why the game is about geese instead of falcons, or lapwings, or crows.

He stares in his mirror, naked as a blade. It's an exercise he does now and then, wandering through the clues. He is not especially tall, and of compact build. He is pale, with a narrow snub nose and hair too dark to be called blond except by people among whom blond is a rarity. The city is sprinkled with Schillers and Goldbergs and Wilenskis and at least a couple of Ricardo Klements, refugees and fugitives and all the old recriminations from the last century's wars. He might be a Jew, he thinks. He is circumcised. 

(Women find it exotic, or funny. Some have asked him very seriously if it improves sensation, and he laughs, and explains that he has nothing to compare it to.)

Americans circumcise too, Jew or gentile. The possibility he is an American is strong.

Senderines has straight teeth, and he has all of them. If he has had any fillings at all, they have not been done in silver or gold. Probably American, or spent enough of his life there it's the same thing. He doesn't have any idea what to make of the scars on his body. They betray no geographical cues, only a history of injury or illness. He can feel the agility and readiness of his body; he is not ill or violently diminished; but his muscles have been used too hard for an ordinary life. There are slim, shallow scars on his forearms, that make him think knife-fight. His nose has probably been broken at least once.

A hundred details, about who he was before he became Carl Katzenbach. It is unlikely he was an upstanding citizen. Upstanding citizens do not end up in the business Senderines is in.

***

The morning that the New York Times published Jimmy's first op-ed, Pam bought him a couple of spare copies on her way in to work. He was already in, of course, half an hour early and chattering on the phone with some college friend with the A section spread all over his desk in a mess. It was unlikely he would have gotten a chance without her name as second author, but still: a first brush with fame is a first brush with fame. If you like fame.

It really had been all his idea: a careful analysis of inter-agency relations, based on publically available data. Because Pam's name was on it, she'd had to submit it to Agency censor, but she'd been around the block a time or two, and they didn't ask her to cut anything. Pam knew how not to say things. She never told Jimmy that she thought the piece was dull and pointless, and that various agencies will keep on snapping at each other's heels as long as they exist; but even the mighty New York Times had to fill a broadsheet every day, and here she was seeing her name in print all over again.

Every instinct of twenty years told her that showing up in the papers was the last step of a disaster already in progress. The news-ink on her fingers smelled like hard water. At least this time, she consoled herself, she was doing it voluntarily, and for a reason. It's amazing the people who will look you up for a chat when they read your name with their morning coffee.

And since it had been Jimmy's idea, it was only fair that he had to field all the phone calls of false cheer that ensued over the course of the day: old colleagues, old strained relationships, a couple of respectful enemies Pam was pleasantly surprised to hear from. She made Jimmy take messages from them all (even her mother) and called back whom she chose. Sitting in her office, staring down at the canyons of Manhattan streets: she liked that control.

Diligent citizens, reminded of her public role as Agency conscience (ugh), gathered to inform her about all the criminal organizations, legacy Soviet institutions, Knights Templar, and space aliens with which the government was in league. She plowed through every earnestly insane, badly-spelled email in her inbox that day, re-reading phrases carefully, but no message revealed itself to her. Most of them weren't even competently proxied; it was a little painful to witness, all those amateur paranoiacs who could be found with a single traceroute. She went home that night dreaming of a glass of wine and a nice long bath to wash the nation's crazy off her skin.

Pam hadn't moved after changing jobs, although she had gotten a new security system and some impressive blinds on her windows. She liked her condo; it was pre-war and classic; it reminded her of herself. And anyway, she'd bought it before the Manhattan real estate market went through the roof: it was her retirement. She was on polite-smile terms with the neighbors, and on chatting terms with the doorman (although really, that was hardly a feat; the real miracle was getting him to shut up), and the radiators didn't clang too loudly in the winter.

A haven, you might call it.

So it wasn't entirely a surprise when she flipped through her mail in the evening cool and found amid the bills and credit card offers a brochure for tourism in Tangier. Still, it was a little upsetting. The front hall had too many entrances, blind doors to basements and back staircases, and she found herself scanning for a solid wall to put her back against. Pam shook herself, after a moment, and carried her mail up to her apartment, and sat with the blinds down in her living room while she examined every word and image in the brochure for a message. It took her nearly an hour to realize it was a real, ordinary brochure, with the imprimatur of a real tourist agency on the cover; a real tourist agency just downstairs from where she worked. In intrigue as in fairy tales, there is no such thing as coincidence. It took her nearly another hour to figure out what to do with that brochure; it sat cheerfully colorful on her desk like some kind of venomous snake. She drank a finger of whisky and wrote down Tom Cronin's home address (without including his name) on a post-it note, and stuck it into the brochure diagonally, as if it had fallen in between the pages by accident.

She slept that night with the brochure locked in her file cabinet, and her handgun, loaded, on the bedside table. It was a bizarre thing, ugly black on the cherrywood table; Pam was used to being the hunter, not potential prey. If it hadn't been so unsettling, it would have been absurd.

In the morning, the brochure got wedged into the outgoing slot of her mailbox in the lobby between the phone bill and a letter responding to her college alumnae association. Pam had no idea how one got past a Manhattan doorman, the kind that remembers every face and shares coffee with every beat cop; but that wasn't her problem. She straightened the lapels of her suit and headed off down the block, secure in the knowledge that she'd done Tom's due diligence for him.

***

Flea markets, street fairs, religious processions: Senderines loves them all. Every conversation he strikes up, every friendly stranger, is a new opportunity to make up a story about himself, each as plausible as the last. He strolls among the pushcarts and roving vendors, nodding to the ones he's talked with before, and feels shored up in the web of people who know his face.

It's not that big a city, or his neighborhood of it is not. He still calls himself Carl, or Carlos sometimes, and when in the course of conversational expectation the blankness overcomes him, that fierce and lovely emptiness of where he grew up or how he came to live in Buenos Aires, he has discovered that the most comfortable lie to tell is that he is a retired soldier, working on his memoirs. From what war and what army he has retired varies with every telling; and Senderines reads enough of the international newspapers that he can select from among any of a hundred conflicts and digress adequately.

Winter in the thicket of narrow streets, crisp breeze around his ankles. Senderines feels strangely awake, strolling among the booksellers. These are the carts he likes best, the rolling bookshelves parked outside where children chase each other and pretend to watch their family's wares. He has tripped over their sport already today, little buckled shoes stomping on his toes, and Senderines smiled away the apologetic half-pause of the little culprit. Without meaning to, he has filled his pockets with chalk to give away, so that all the children can play games on the roughly-paved streets.

Grandmothers with swollen legs wheel carts full of the morning's purchases, careful selections for Sunday dinner tomorrow. Senderines dodges among them, feeling like a child hopping among the square cobblestones, and comes up against the wooden edge of a shelf. The stacked volumes totter, about to slip, and Senderines catches them. Nobody is about, or nobody to claim the double-handful of books he has rescued. Young voices, calling to each other, down the street: absent salespeople. He puts them back, angling the taller books so they won't fall again. It is the least he can do.

But the feel of them, the books in hand, rough thumb over the rough fabric binding. Senderines can't move on. He touches ancient leather spines, old law-books or something similarly meaningless to him. Rows upon rows, collected wisdom and foolishness heaped together. Mostly unwanted, or they would not be sold so cheaply. Dog-eared corners and sometimes whole wavy pages, rippling as if still wet. Senderines likes the haphazard nature of the street sellers' wares, how Saint Augustine and board-game rulebooks sit side by side in equal neglect. His wandering hand comes to a sudden stop.

There are people in the street, he knows this. He has only just purchased a scarf this morning, only just half an hour ago, from a dark girl with unwashed hair from the country, selling knockoffs and maybe some stolen goods arrayed on a blanket on the sidewalk. But with a suddenness like being startled out of a dream, Senderines is alone, standing in front of a cart, index finger like a pointer or like an accusation extended to touch the smooth paper spine of a book.

There's a spiral printed there, like a fingerprint just under where his own fingertip rests, as if he marked the book the way it marks him. Above the spiral is printed the word: _Rayuela_ , as if speaking directly to him. Hopscotch.

With his free hand he taps his coat pockets: the pieces of chalk are still in his pockets, waiting to be given away. He pulls the book out from among its brothers, grabs it near, drinks in the cover. _Rayuela_. The spiral. And then, with a thunder like an oncoming train, the author's name: Julio Cortázar.

A terrible stabbing pain attacks Senderines at the temple, so sudden and horrifying that he reaches up with the book still in hand, expecting to touch the handle of some slim, pitiless weapon, its blade in his skull, wavering gently to the rhythm of his faltering heartbeat. His skin is unbroken, his cheek shaved smooth only that morning. Shuddering, hyperalert, Senderines staggers in a quick circle after the sensation of someone watching him. It is instantaneous certainty, as unreasonable and nerve-jangling as the book itself. Like a rifle, his eye aims and finds its target.

Fifty meters up the street, in the direction he's come from: a man reading an advertisement pasted to the wall. There is no one thing that gives Senderines his certainty, just the man, his shape, his black clothing, the way he appears invisible to the crowd. No child would stomp on that foot; she would swerve out of the way in her pursuit of the game and never know why. He is like a ghost, or maybe he is a ghost, or maybe he is the harbinger of Senderines's own death.

The impulse to flee is stifling, stiffening, perversely rooting him to the spot. Senderines cannot go; it is all he can do to force his throbbing eyes down so that he is not staring. He clutches the book in his hands, warping it, nearly folding it in half as he struggles for control. No angry salesman steps into his way to object to this abuse. There is no witness, just the crowd as it ebbs and flows around him, faces blending together into a shapeless mass of strangers.

Of course they would come for him. Senderines shakes his head smartly, and regains a measure of control. He failed his assignment, and had harsh words from his handler. These months of idyll in the city have only been waiting, before the final strike. They have come for him now, and his role is to be ready.

Away from the carts of shambled books, and down the incline of the street, walking naturally. Senderines has never been habitual about carrying a weapon; it is too much risk and too much bother. He has only the chalk in his pockets and the book in his hand. The harbinger behind him, that profile like looking at a familiar coin. That man may be following, or he may hang back, and find another time and place. A leisurely pace, a stroll, an idle man idly walking. Senderines contemplates his death as he goes, ears pricked for the ringing shot from behind that might do it, and the surety is almost exquisite.

***

It only took three days for things to happen. Jimmy was staggering into Pam's office under a tower of research studies when her direct line rang. Irritated, she picked up the phone herself and barked, "What?" while gesturing Jimmy towards the table with his burden. It was six o'clock, and she was looking at at least another hour before they'd be done.

"He's flipping out, Pam," said a voice: Tom. Tom in that staccato mode of rapid summary from the old days. He said, "I don't know what he'll do."

Caught out, Pam stood behind her desk and glanced around the room. Jimmy was just turning around, and would probably stare. "Okay, where are you?" she asked, avoiding Tom's name. Her office was on a high floor, with reasonable security-protocols -- but of course, they were talking about the man who'd successfully walked into a Deputy Director's office, and out again. This place was no safer than any other. Jimmy had probably never handled a weapon in his life.

"Pay phone," Tom panted. Maybe he's been forced to sprint. "He decked me, but it's not me he's mad at. I just -- I needed to warn you." She didn't know whether he was in Manhattan or near his home. That could mean a lead time of ten minutes, or an hour.

Pamela put a hand to her forehead. "Don't go back to the office with a black eye," she said, and that was when Jimmy's body language let her know he was paying attention.

"He's smarter than that," said Tom. "No bruises where clothes can't hide them." He hung up then, an unsteady noise as if he'd missed the cradle the first time and had to try again. That was all the prep she was going to get.

"...Ms. Landy?" asked Jimmy. He stood on the other side of her desk, hands out as if to calm her down. 

"Friend of mine," she said at once. She hung up the phone and shook herself. "Domestic situation. I'm going to have to go pick him up from the precinct."

Jimmy pulled his hands back towards his own body, hid them behind his back. "Oh," he strangled out. Pam wondered desperately whether this poor kid had ever even been in a relationship -- but no, that was silly. He was twenty-two, not a kid at all.

"Don't ever let your partner smack you around," she intoned, and closed up her briefcase. Its weight in her hand seemed enormous, impossible. She took nothing with her that would be actionable. "Don't stay after me; we can pick back up in the morning, okay?"

"Okay," said Jimmy. He flexed his shoulders, recovering from the fluster. "If there's anything I can do --"

"No," Pam told him. God save her from the loyalty of her assistants. "Thank you." She walked out of her office with Jimmy standing helpless behind her.

Out on the street, loud and near-sweat in the late afternoon, Pam stood in her heels on the concrete for a long moment, indecisive. The clamor of rush hour, the crush of rushing executives on the sidewalk: she made her decision. She stepped out off the curb, and put up her arm to hail a taxi.

***

Senderines is in the park, not far from the Biblioteca. He has not seen the man all in black again. It is three days now, and the anticipation has built into an unbearable eagerness. He takes a seat on a bench to watch a group of boys kicking a ball, shouting at each other. There are five boys, the three smallest on a team against the older two. They point and shout at one another, sometimes laughing sometimes angry. Senderines cannot guess whether they are all brothers, or just a motley gang of friends.

The man all in black sits down next to him on the park bench. 

He is like a crow alighting on a human hand: alert, nimble, always with the hint of flight. His clothing is not quite European but not local either. His shoes are practical; they remind Senderines of the fear he should be feeling.

They sit on the same park bench, Senderines and the man all in black, and watch the children hover in orbit around the ball, spiralling outward and then in again to kick at each other's shins. The sun is in their faces. They don't look at each other, and the calls and shouts of the children fill the air.

"You come here often," says the man. His hands are open, palms down, clutching his own knees. 

Senderines accepts this signal and does the same with his own hands. "I do," he replies. "I suppose that means you come here often too." Abruptly, he realizes they are speaking to one another in Spanish, and wonders why. 

The man squints into the sun, a fan of lines around his eyes. "I came here to find you," he says. His face is pale, but covered with freckles. There are fine lines around his mouth as well; he is older than Senderines had initially guessed. His hair is cropped quite short, nearly short enough to be brutal, and a middling brown darker than the color on Senderines's own head. It is a wonder what they must look like, two blond Argentines speaking on a park bench in this neighborhood of faded glory. This stranger has the compact muscularity of the vaquero in him, but not the manner.

"So," says Senderines, at last, at last. "You have found me."

The man all in black turns gently, his neck like a marble column, and his pale eyes dart everywhere. Senderines allows himself to be observed. His heart thunders in his chest, exhilaration a-tremble in his fingertips.

The man frowns and asks, "What do people call you?"

A strange way to phrase that question. Senderines considers carefully the identification card in his wallet, and the many different passports he has secreted about the city in safe places. The stranger waits for an answer, agitated but in control. He keeps his hands to himself and his feet on the ground. Senderines shifts on one hip so that they may face each other comfortably, and says, "Look, I don't know what you're after. I can tell you any name you like."

The stranger says nothing. Senderines has one elbow over the back of the bench, and knows how well he can capture the casual pose of fashionable urban living. To complete the portrait he flashes a smile at this man, a blink of irony and ennui. The stranger's eyes widen in poorly-controlled surprise.

"All right," says Senderines with a little shrug. He can feel himself grinning uncontrollably. "If you must know, my passport says I am Carl Katzenbach, from Munich by way of North America."

The stranger nods at this: expected information. Senderines watches him steel himself, twitches in his blunt face like a cascade of remorse. He switches to English to ask: "Does the name Gordon --" But Senderines doesn't hear the rest. He doubles over, the migraine attack so surprising that its force is like a physical blow, reverberating through his skull. His eyes snap shut and he sees coronas around a phantom-stranger, a reverse-color after-image like white chalk on dark wet streets, a man-shaped throb of pain. Senderines loses himself so badly that he hardly recognizes the hand on his shoulder, on his temple, pulling on his own fingers where they clutch in his hair.

The iron clamor between his ears is all, and Senderines struggles to sit upright. The stranger speaks to him, low and rhythmic, a nursery rhyme or a litany, something nonsensical. It catches the rhythm of his throbbing head and Senderines mumbles, shaking, "I'm sorry, I get these headaches --"

"I know," says the stranger, and helps him to stand. Senderines has no balance, and to open his eyes is to invite the world to twirl around him terrifyingly. Warm limbs support him as he tries to walk, and that low voice is there: deflecting a matron's curiosity, directing a taxi driver. Senderines finds himself jouncing in the back seat of a car, with his head on someone's knee. A cupped hand shades his eyes and limits his vision to the undersides of several pink knuckles. The throb returns, punishing now, heavy metallic ringing like the harbinger of his own death, and Senderines can't think anything any more.

***

Pam's condo faced east, and got very little afternoon sun. She never pulled the blinds before leaving for work; she didn't care how warm it might get in the afternoons.

She walked into her home a good two hours before sunset and paused, assessing the dimness. No window was uncovered; the air was thick, newly-disturbed. The faintest whiff touched her nose, of male sweat.

With careful deliberation she shut the door behind her, and threw the deadbolt. Anybody coming late to the party would have to break down the door, at least. She dropped her briefcase next to her desk and marched directly to the radio. A steady patter of newsy false cheer filled the room, blaring, cloying like too-sweet alcohol. She turned around.

He was standing in the middle of her kitchen, of course. (Best place to find a weapon, if he didn't have any to begin with.) Jason Bourne, David Webb, presumed dead and no less alive than the last time she'd met him. The only time she'd met him, actually: wary rush of crossing paths, the weight of her career ending as he handed her the damning papers. They'd spent more time sparring on the phone than they ever had speaking in person. Looking at a years-old photograph wasn't the same thing at all. 

Millions of dollars on an international manhunt, and he was standing in her kitchen in New York City.

Pam walked up to the threshold between the rooms, hands loose by her sides. "David," she greeted him. He wasn't looking directly at her; he used eye-contact like any other weapon in his arsenal. He was ready, athletic. His knees always suggested running. She had forgotten, till this very moment, that in her heels she was almost exactly his height.

He didn't speak. He seemed to take up all the space in the room, just by being in it.

"Tom called," she said, after a moment. "You scared him badly."

His voice was low and rasping, as if he'd forgotten how to talk: "Why didn't you tell me."

She kept her distance, not to defend herself but to signal to him that she respected his space. Even if she could get past him, and find the weapon in her bedside table, and find it miraculously untouched despite his presence (a sudden shudder, that he'd probably been in her _bedroom_ without her knowing it; and then she filed away that weakness for some other time) -- even if she had a weapon in her hand at that moment, he had both bulk and speed, and ten times the training. She chose to assume he wished her well.

"I don't know what he told you." She grimaced at David's blunt surprise. "I presume it's more than was in your official jacket."

He put his fingertips on the polished stone countertop. It was faintly ridiculous, a man like him in a kitchen like this. Pam was pretty sure there wasn't anything edible in the fridge.

The obvious felt like a necessary statement: "I can guess it was about recruiting practices, or the conditioning they did. Something shameful, something they wouldn't write down. Tom knew you'd be angry." And then, halting: "He was angry, too."

It was a little frightening, the things anger could make you do. Here she was in the private sector, thanks to anger. David made a vague gesture, as if pushing something away from himself. She didn't know how he handled the memories.

She clasped her hands together in front of her, nonthreatening. "Why don't we talk it over. If Tom can't do anything on his end --"

He interrupted. "Gordon Webb, three one four one niner seven polecat, codename Katzenbach." He spoke flatly, so quietly that Pam had to fight the impulse to step closer to hear him. "Recruited May 2002, deployed November of that year."

The name hit home, after a moment. Of course: no such thing as coincidence. She found herself a-tremble, unbearably tense through her ribcage. How an asset could stand it -- "Recruited after you went into the wild," she realized aloud. David's ruthless attention drank in her body language, her face. She said, truthfully: "I didn't know anything about it."

Pam did not see him move. The wind hit her face and then his palm was over her throat, fingers loose on the skin. He had calluses, rough spots, on each fingertip. She stood very, very still while his other hand closed over her wrist.

Up close, she remembered that his hooded little eyes were blue-gray and bright. The smell of his adrenaline rolled over her. "How would I know, David?" she reasoned. "I wasn't cleared to read black ops files till Berlin. I was a hunter: double agents, corrupt administrators, that kind of thing. Until you came along. And even then." And even then: cupidity, recklessness, egomania. She'd found plenty of hunting to do.

Silence, between them. The radio news surged and rolled behind her like heavy surf on the shore. He didn't let go, and he didn't squeeze his hand closed to strangle her. She breathed out and stirred the fine hairs on his freckled cheek.

"Do you remember him at all?"

David broke away, then, and paced to the far end of the room. His back was turned while he said, "He's three years younger than me. Your man recognized the face before he noticed the name."

"Oh, Tom," she whispered.

David heaved his shoulders and said, "He's already been on three missions." He put a hand on the windowsill: the window that led to the fire escape. Well, at least he had to obey the laws of physics like anybody else, and hadn't just appeared from thin air.

Pam watched him move, that clever efficiency. What he might have been like, as a colleague -- she took a step after him. "He can be saved, David." He glanced over his shoulder, bringing her up short. Under his scrutiny, she crossed her arms and shrugged. "I mean, if you did it, surely he can too."

An odd little twitch at the corner of his mouth. Pam had no idea what he might look like when he smiled. He unlocked the window, and took hold of the blinds. "He was looking for me," he said. "They got their hands on him because he was looking for me."

With that, he was gone. He didn't bother to close the window.

Shaking, she got a good strong grip on the countertop and breathed. She gave herself a minute, the second hand on the wall sweeping slowly around, and then straightened up to go turn off the radio.

***

It's very dark when he wakes. Senderines feels sheets against his arms and fights them, only for a moment. He is in a low bed, with his shoes and jacket removed. He thinks he is alone.

"You're awake," says the man all in black, from a doorway. He has been on a balcony, the city lights behind him. The room is not far from the city center, and several stories up. Senderines and the stranger remain still for a long time in the thick darkness. Finally the stranger takes one slow step and turns on a table-lamp. They're in a small, respectable room, with decorated tiles along the top of the wall and wooden shutters outside the window-glass. Senderines has no idea what he's doing there.

"My name is Senderines," he declares.

"Your name is Gordon," says the stranger.

"My name is Gordon," Senderines repeats, just to feel it in his mouth. The words do not ring from the impact. They're speaking English with each other, and do not seem ever to have doubted that they share that native tongue. "How did you know?"

"I came to find you," says the stranger. He makes a small, controlled gesture and Senderines -- Gordon -- looks around the room. A suitcase stands in one corner, his own suitcase, and two or three boxes full of things from his flat. He can see several of his books peeking out from the top of the closest box. "Is this everything? We'll have to leave soon."

Gordon understands at once that they will be travelling together. The stranger does not appear to have any suitcase of his own. 

"I failed my third assignment," he confesses. "Deliberately failed. I couldn't have told you why."

The stranger finds that unnerving. It makes him sweat. He says, slowly, "I did too. But it wasn't my third."

"Then we've got something in common --" Gordon stops, frowning. They frown at each other. He is very close to the answer, now. "Haven't we?"

The man all in black shakes himself quickly, an efficient movement like a cat twitching its ears away from rain. "Your bank box. Any deposits you've made, any local caches you can't live without. I'll need a list."

"I --" Gordon drinks in the sight of this stranger, his power. He cannot stop staring.

He accepts the pad of blank paper he is handed and tries to think of addresses he can write down. The pen in his hand is shaky, looping idle spirals while the man all in black watches. Gordon wants to write a name, and doesn't dare.

The stranger waits patiently, half an eye on the view from the balcony. Gordon sits with the sheets still around his hips, shoes neatly side by side on the floor, and the pad of paper in his lap. He tests himself: "David?"

The man all in black whips his head around, poised for violence. That face, like looking at a familiar coin. Gordon can predict every one of its expressions with absolute certainty.

"Good," he says to himself. "I remembered that right." He watches David relax slowly, amazement creeping out of his features, and return to half-vigilance. After a few moments Gordon climbs out of the bed stiffly, and brings the pad of paper to his brother. "I'll show you myself."

David takes the paper. It is covered with spirals, pushing inward from the outer edge: the Game of the Goose in miniature, over and over. He does not understand; no reason he would understand. Gordon recognizes suddenly that he has always been the playful one, the one with too much imagination. That name, _Senderines_ : little pathways. He has never doubted that he would find a way.

"I don't remember any more," he says, after a long pause. David is watching him with icy fright. "I don't remember why we fought. What it could have been, that was so bad."

The thaw in those blue eyes is as wondrous and as humdrum as the return of spring. "I don't either," says David, and his mouth turns upward in a slow smile. They grin at each other, a little foolish, and Gordon realizes how much they look alike.

He unkinks his back and they move quickly together: removing the top five or eight pages from the paper, burning them in the trash can. David wipes door-handles with a bit of handkerchief while Gordon pulls on his shoes and jacket. Gordon glances through the items David has gathered from the abandoned flat, and keeps very little: just some clothing, his shaving kit, the book _Rayuela_. Gordon hasn't even read it yet. Everything else is meaningless. They stuff it back into the boxes and make ready to leave.

The shocky sway of his stride is evidence enough that Gordon will not be the one carrying his suitcase. David hefts it, easy, and asks, one last time, "Anything else?"

"No," says Gordon, and it sounds hollow so he takes a deep breath and says: "This'll do."

They let themselves out the door and down six flights of stairs. Their shoes are too practical to echo in the stairwell. At the bottom, they pause to let Gordon catch his breath. There are no taxis prowling, not at this hour. The dawn is a low yawning gray when they emerge onto the silent sidewalk. It is easy. They step into the thicket of streets, turn, and disappear.


End file.
